i currently find myself with strong feelings of weirdness at times toward my husband.he told me about his emotional involvement with a female co worker last sunday.i want to move on toward mending our relationship and getting over the depression,anxiety,and self pity i have been beating myself up with all week.please help.

You are supposed to feel grief and sadness when you have experienced such a traumatic shock. Adultery is the greatest betrayal a spouse can commit in a marriage. You are looking at 18-24 months of recovery. This will not go away overnight.

You are probably still in shock and there is nothing to do but let time pass. Read all you can on the site and learn. It will be months before you begin to feel better and only then if you husband doing everything he can to help you heal.

How do you "get over" feelings ~~~ in general, you feel them and accept them and do not "pretend" they are absent

some "feelings" must be looked at but not acted upon .... for instance wanting to slap the smirk of the teenager's face ... prolly best to acknowledge that feeling and NOT act on it ... or a feeling of attraction to someone not married to you ... acknowledge and then put yourself in a safe position where you CANNOT act on the feeling (teenager slap is usually not a good idea ... so walk away <<< voice of experience talking here <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" /> )

The "move on" part of your question never ceases to amaze me. It is common to ask this question ~as if~ there was a choice to NOT "move on". You will "move on" no matter what, just as you will age no matter what.... unless you have a time-travel device in your backyard (Delorean perhaps?)

So just "moving on" is never enough. You want to move forward with new awareness and new tools and a fresh perspective regarding some of the harder lessons life throws our way.

You locate some of your core values and you put them to work for you ... and you scoop up your dignity and your pride and you dust them off and polish them up a bit by taking ACTION that will give you a boost ... do this based on past experience of what has worked for you before ... start with simple steps/tasks and take life ~as is~ without feathering it to look like a peacock when sometimes life is actually a grey pidgeon .... <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

feelings just are

behaviors you get to choose

you get into recovery whether you want to or not

how you do this sometimes depends on doing the ~right thing~ or the ~smart thing~ in spite of your feelings ... which always are temporary

Best of luck

Pep

eajake3 - Of course you have these feelings and of course you'd like them to "go away" and be "over it." We all felt the same way, but what everyone has found out is that it simply doesn't work that way with severe emotional trauma.

The AVERAGE recovery timeframe is 2 years. Adultery, Emotional and/or Physical IS that devastating and it takes a long time to FULLY heal from such personal and scorching trauma. It is, emotionally speaking, very much like having 3rd degree burns over your entire body because your spouse splashed gasoline on you, struck the match, and CHOSE to set you ablaze with their action of bringing the gasoline and lit match together because THEY wanted to "feel warm."

Most burns of that nature, sadly, are NOT recoverable from. A few find the way to recovery, but there is much work and pain along the way, BEFORE attaining full recovery. Right now, to carry the analogy a little further, you are in "the Firefighters just put out the flames and the Paramedics are trying to stablize you enough to transport you to where you can BEGIN the long process of recovery."

You will need to make Patience and Endurance part of your everyday "Watchwords." If you believe in Christ, then you know that Romans 8:28 and Philippians 4:13 are TRUE. You also know that those promises are for the "long haul," not just "today."

God bless. Hang in there. It WILL get better.